Power BI – Cloud Business Intelligence Tool

Interactive Data Visualization

In this Information Age, more data is being generated than ever. Analytics can’t seem to keep up with the inflow. Excel and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) have long dominated both spectrum of Microsoft business intelligence stack. Power BI is a newer suite of cloud-based business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights.

Power BI Cloud or Desktop?

Power BI is a web-based tool that allows creation and sharing of data visualizations, right on Office 365. For basic functionality, Power BI editor is perfect. Power BI Desktop, however, runs on your computer and is best for all but the most basic scenarios.

Power BI is capable of using data from many different sources, including OneDrive, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and even public web pages with data tables. This opens up the many opportunities, as data does live everywhere nowadays.

ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)

An integral of data analytics is data cleansing. Garbage in, garbage out! Power BI has a built-in query editor and allow easily perform ETL on the copy of source data, which leaves the sources data intact. Cleansed data, improved intelligence!

Data Visualizations

Once you loaded you data sources, creating visualizations becomes extremely simple. Power BI supports a variety of visualizations, such as line graphs, pie charts, and even maps. Simply drag the visualization you want into the report page, then drag the data you have into the visualization. Power BI automatically creates and formats the visualizations for you.

Dashboard

How easy is it to show off your work? Simply publish your reports to the cloud. Power BI cloud service synchronizes data at regular intervals. Data stays fresh!.From the cloud, you can place your visualizations into dashboards. You can also shared reports as “packages”.

No matter where data lives, Power BI is able to pull it together and help you better understand it and make informed decisions.